Shame on You, Rabbi.

"But issues like slavery and civil rights are very rare, once in a generation, and invoking them for everything from social welfare policy to Dodd-Frank to the methods of vetting immigrants is both dishonest and cheapening a great moral legacy. If you are using the march on Selma to religiously validate your views on the minimum wage, shame on you."

One of the best loved and generally most thoughtful rabbis of our time wrote these words.

They are a shattering, clarion indictment of the level of privilege, comfort, and blissful ignorance taken for granted in much of the American Jewish world.

In point of historical fact, when slavery was the leading issue of the day, synagogues were overwhelmingly silent. When Rabbi Herschel marched by Rev.Dr.King, he was ostracized and roundly criticized by his peers. The priority of the rabbinic pulpits of the day was to be polite and quiet and avoid rocking the boat. The most obscene and obvious of injustices were normal in their day.

The very statement that such issues come along once in a generation is a statement of faith in the status quo, of confidence and complicity in the current normal. It is not a statement rooted in social analysis, historical aptitude, or moral or intellectual rigor; it is a statement rooted in comfort, and a desire to keep things comfortable.

It is not acceptable for a professional who has never had to choose betweeen food and heat, who leads a community that take for granted the ability to own their own home and eat regularly in restaurants, to wish shame upon those speaking for the lives warped and lost to the travesty of working poverty. It is not acceptable for a parent who does not live knowing their child has double, triple, quadruple the chance of dying of violence to dismiss current identity issues as special interest politics.

It is not acceptable for spokesperson of an ethos whose single most emphasized commandment is to welcome the stranger-- to actively consider and care for the well-being of the outsider-- to advocate for "The Gentleman's Agreement" of valuing the camaraderie of the complacent above the inclusion of the marginalized.